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15

Voted to close — a good question, but we really should avoid subjective ones here.
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apostlionAug 17 '10 at 20:19

19

@Apostlion: Simply because it's subjective does not mean it can't be answered. There are (community defined) "good" applications that are useful on a daily basis.
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Josh KAug 17 '10 at 20:22

27

Voted to reopen - it is subjective, but a popular and useful style of question, if kept as a wiki and not repeated too much. These questions are mostly accepted on gadgets.stackexhange.com for example.
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Jon HadleyAug 17 '10 at 21:08

10

Can we make this Community Wiki? And also 1 app per answer? Much easier to check if something has already been said and to edit to add information about said app. Thank you.
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Loïc WolffAug 19 '10 at 20:39

11

I did a lot of cleanup. Changed all the app names to ## (because it was the most commonly used in the existing answers. Moved links so that they were within the app names. Removed some first-person descriptors.
–
Robert S CiaccioAug 23 '10 at 3:18

239 Answers
239

Technically this is both an iOS and Mac OS X application. What it does is let you use your iPad as a second monitor with your Mac. When I am using my Mac my iPad isn't usually in use (unless a family member stole it) so I use Air Display to make it useful while I am using my Mac. You get a 1024x768 or 768x1024 display that rotates and flips automatically - like you would expect.

The Mac portion is free, but you buy the iPad App. Runs with Windows too. Operates over WiFi, but you can always create a private network if one does not exist or it is too slow!

For web developers who develop websites locally on their Mac. VirtualHostX manages your Apache Virtual Hosts and enable the use of domain names that point to your local machine (even non-routable domain names.) VirtualHostX does this by managing your Mac's hosts file and your Apache httpd.conf and httpd-vhosts.conf config files. It even supports MAMP (although I don't use MAMP.)

It's one of my top 5 favorite apps and one I'd hate to do without. I use it every time I start a new project!

SABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python.
It's totally free, incredibly easy to use, and works practically everywhere.
SABnzbd makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything we can. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.

Designed for scientists, Papers manages PDFs of journal articles. Articles imported to Papers can easily have their metadata applied from journal databases. Articles can then easily be sorted by author or journal, and labeled with different categories. Papers has an associated iOS app that it syncs with.

SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.

Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

If you're finding your laptop screen too bright at night even on the minimum brightness, Shady's the right guy for you. Basically, it puts a transparent overlay over your entire screen, dimming it anywhere between 0% and 90% of normal.

VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Ideas, images, lists, passwords, your mom's apple pie recipe. Anything you need to keep track of and organize. VoodooPad will grow with you without getting in the way. Drag and drop folders, PDFs, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad, and they will link up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach.

The absolute KING of creative tools. Sure, the price is a bit up there, although there really isn't anything that can touch the versatility of having seventeen applications at your disposal. I've used some of these tools since their very existence (Illustrator, Photoshop) and I honestly can't imagine working without them. It would be difficult to describe what they all do; infinite possibilities.

An amazing calculator that does it all with a nice text-based interface.

Just type your problem as you'd write it on paper. You see your answer instantly. No setting up formulas, no equals button. If you make a mistake, you don't have to start all over again, you just hit delete.

Hiss is an OSX app that forwards notifications from Growl enabled apps
to Notification Center in Mountain Lion.

Currently in beta, but it does an awesome job of piping all your Growl notifications into the Notification Center of OS X Mountain Lion. The only real downside to it is that it flags all notifications with the Growl icon.

I use keepassX because it is open source software, vs lastpass, 1password which are not. I'm no fan of the non-native look, but my best alternative - and I would love to be corrected on this - is to use an encrypted textfile
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HectorMalotJan 27 '13 at 12:19

This application is no longer developed. The original app, Smultron, which was abandonned, is now developed again (and available on the App Store). So Fraise developer said there would be no other update to Fraise.
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Loïc WolffMay 29 '11 at 16:39

For all those low-light situations, Nocturne is a tool for inverting colors, changing screen tint etc. So I can make the screen dimmer while keeping it readable, when the dimmest backlight setting is too bright.

I especially like the Invert hue option, which can be used to keep colors the same while inverting black/white.

Base is an awesome tool for managing SQLite databases. It has an intuitive interface and allows you to easily create or alter tables. I especially like that the transcript shows you exactly what queries Base is executing against your database.